Today, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Center for Communication Programs (CCP) Knowledge for Health (K4Health) project presented work on building eLearning capacity for HIV/AIDS programming in Southern Africa at the 19th International AIDS Conference.

The presentation highlighted how the K4Health project enabled the Southern Africa HIV and AIDS Information Dissemination Service (SAfAIDS) to develop technically accurate, regionally appropriate, interactive eLearning courses for public health professionals in the Southern Africa region.

With the help of K4Health in the areas of strategic planning, training and course development, SAfAIDS has developed and launched three eLearning courses (which 700 public health professionals have enrolled in the past four months). These free, online courses supplement and extend the reach of SAfAIDS’s existing face-to-face HIV/AIDS trainings that serve to support the organizations and individuals who respond to HIV/AIDS and gender-based violence in their community.

The partnership with K4Health has enabled SAfAIDS to not only implement distance learning activities where virtual health information was needed yet lacking, it also has created a sustainable process by which SAfAIDS can continue to create and deliver pertinent information on HIV/AIDS topics to public health professionals in the Southern African region after the K4Health project has ended.

SAfAIDS staff credit K4Health for recognizing when and what type of HIV/AIDS information is needed and how to frame that information effectively for eLearning courses significantly easier for its staff.

The partnership between K4Health and SAfAIDS was originally developed to meet the ongoing demand among public health professionals in the Southern Africa region for context-specific health information where the cost of delivering health information to the public health professionals who need it the most remains very high and the percentage of Internet users in most African countries has grown at exponential levels.

View the Knowledge for Health: building eLearning capacity to support knowledge sharing and skills building for HIV/AIDS programming in southern Africa abstract.